Toe injury doesn’t deter Spencer Johnson in injury return as he picked up four wickets against Perth Scorchers.
Toe injury no hurdle as Johnson returns to BBL in style.
Spencer Johnson’s “bizarre” toe injury has left a number of sports doctors and surgeons perplexed.
During South Australia’s Sheffield Shield match against Western Australia last month, he broke a tendon in the middle toe of his right foot. After playing four white-ball matches against Pakistan in eight days, Johnson, 29, bowled 45 overs in the match, making just his sixth first-class appearance.
He missed the first two games of the season against the defending BBL champions, the Brisbane Heat, and had been sidelined for a month. But in an incredible comeback on Boxing Day, when he recorded career-best BBL statistics of 4 for 20 in Heat’s 33-run defeat to Perth Scorchers at Optus Stadium, he shown no outward indications of difficulty.
“To be honest, we still don’t really know how it’s happened or why it’s happened,” Johnson told reporters after the match. “I think four surgeons have looked at it, four sports doctors have looked at it, and they are all mindblown.
“I think we just manage it and look after it and hopefully it will be all good.”
The pain is not constant but strapping is required, which is unusual for a toe and involves a rather complicated process. “It’s pretty hectic,” Johnson said of the strapping. “It really only hurts when I curl over or claw over. We’ve sort of stopped it from curling over [with the strapping] and that seems to work.
“We’ve come up with a decent method to strap it and hopefully that will be all right for the rest of the season. It’s such a bizarre injury, I could wake up tomorrow and it could be all right. We’re looking after it, we’ll consequently manage it.”